The radio crackled a few decades ago and a supervisor called me to the office. When I arrived, our department head invited me in an unfamiliar friendly tone to step into his own office.

As soon as I did so, a uniformed marshal stepped out from behind the door and asked me if I was Bart Stinson. It was about a traffic ticket. I lived in a state with no personal income tax, and they were very serious about their other revenue sources. I was serious about my income sources, too, and was working a lot of overtime. I usually got home around 2 or 3 o’clock. I overslept a couple of 8 a.m. court appointments.

Did I have enough cash to pay the fine on the spot? It was my last chance to avoid arrest. But I didn’t have it. And so I took off my work shirt, emptied my pockets, took off my belt, removed my shoe strings, and the marshal searched and handcuffed me. Then he perp-walked me past gaping customers and co-workers to a government vehicle, where I was shackled at the ankles.

He drove me through the desert and across a major city to reach his suburban jail. There is no way it could have been cost-effective for them. But they were making an example of me, and they were teaching me a lesson. I guarantee you that I never slept through a court date again, even if it meant reducing my work schedule and losing much-needed income.

It was the second time in my life that I had been jailed. In neither case did the authorities ask me if I’d like to have my family with me in jail. I can honestly report that I missed my family while I was in jail. I had some anxiety about the consequences of my quarantine. But when the government takes custody of law-breakers, it’s not for the convenience and preferences of the law-breaker.

I met several young men in jail. None of them were allowed to have their loved ones in jail with them, either. Through the slats of the holding tank, we saw the officers walk young women in single file to the podium for processing. None of them were allowed to keep children with them in jail.

So far as I know, nobody ever appealed to the authorities to let any of us keep family with us in jail. It’s safe to say nobody cared that we were isolated from our family members.

However, Democrats and nominal Republicans are outraged that foreign adults, taken into custody for immigration misdemeanors, are temporarily segregated from children whom they claim as family.

Open-borders Democrats say that families should be released on their promise to appear for hearings to determine their immigration outcomes. But over the past 20 years, 37 percent of parties released pending immigration hearings were no-shows for the scheduled proceedings. Almost one million aliens with final orders of deportation have not left our country.

Thus immigration hawks are right to resist Democrats’ demand to release foreign invaders into our communities.

Over the first year of the Trump administration, front-line immigration enforcement reported a 315% increase in “illegal aliens fraudulently using [unrelated] children to pose as family units to gain entry into this country.” I have yet to hear a Democrat or #Nevertrump Republican express any concern whatsoever about this.

We’re told by indignant MSNBC news ranters that it is not a crime to be a refugee. But if the invaders were sincerely interested in applying for refugee status, they could have done so at any U.S. embassy in their own countries. They could have done so at ports such as El Paso and San Ysidro, where there is a system in place for adjudicating such requests.

That would have required them to submit to our sovereignty and authority. But the invading immigrants are advised by their own governments and by open-borders U.S. organizations to cross the border illegally. And so our government is faced with unsatisfactory options: ignore the invasion, or accept the expense and organizational burdens of housing, feeding and caring for large numbers of invaders.

Open-borders Democrats hope to burden the system with such high and unattainable requirements that the Trump administration will eventually relent, and release the invaders on the honor system. Large numbers of these invaders will skip their immigration hearings, wait for a future amnesty, and eventually ripen into dependable Democrat bloc voters.

This is the long-term arc of the Democratic strategy: to import enough invaders, to naturalize enough of them as citizens, and to register enough of them to vote here that the Democratic majority will be permanent. They won’t have to worry about competitive elections anymore. From that point forward, Democrats will never have to worry about the Electoral College, the “fly-over states” or the Deplorables.

It’s not the first time Democrats have attempted to “American-proof” U.S. elections. This is the party, remember, that wanted apportionment of Congressional districts and the Electoral College based in part on enormous slave populations that they forbade to vote. For raging, hyper-entitled Democrats, there’s always more than one way to skin a cat.

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